The Need to Play

Yeah, the coffee is pretty good, and CC has been on my lap most of the morning. I just finished an hour of sermon preparation. I'll do more later. Right now, I want to peck on the computer.

I woke up this morning in the wee hours, and I was dreaming when I drifted from sleep back into consciousness. My subject was the motivation of my obsessive behaviors, or at least one motivation. I may have written on this before. Maybe, I'm not sure. Pecking on the keyboard is therapeutic for me so I will write without doing a search on former posts in EndangeredSwimmer. 

In years past, I rode my bicycle crazy distances. One year, 2010, I did 37 rides of 100 or more miles the longest being 174 in one day. For several years I did one day journey runs going the marathon distance or more over and over and over. Once, I did a five-day run. And then there is swimming, the all-day swimming. I have worked that up to sixteen hours, to 23.5 miles.

I really do have more than one motivation for this behavior, and I am convinced that it is part of my nature, part of the way God made me. But my dream this morning was about something I had previously identified and may have mentioned a time or two. Part of my drive to do these things lies in the face that I am attempting to regain something lost in my childhood. In short, I am trying to play and trying to recapture that feeling of freedom I experienced so much and always took for granted when I went out to play as a little boy. 

Do you ever have it? experience it? seek it? that feeling of freedom? For me it is delicious, precious, and rare, and the older I get the more rare it becomes. Part of becoming an adult, of course, is self-discipline and dependability. You have to do stuff, a lot of stuff, a lot of the time. There is always a schedule and staying married and remaining employed is contingent upon keeping schedules. Even now, on my day off, I have an index card on the bed beside me with a list of things I need to accomplish today. I'd rather tear the card up, put my running shoes on, and head out Money Road for the day. But presently, I am neither fit enough nor healthy enough to make the effort. And the list remains.

Sigh.

But I still want it, want that feeling that I am free, that there is no schedule, and that I have to answer to no one. I want the wind in my face, the sun in my eyes, and the long road under my shoes. I suspect it must have been much the same for Adam and Eve after being exiled from the Garden of Eden. Only after losing paradise could paradise have been truly appreciated just like only after growing up do we realize how magically wonderful childhood was. So my yearning to play is really just the cosmic urge of mankind to return to his roots, to the Garden God made us for. But according to the Bible, it is not a Garden we will go to but a city. God will make all things new, remove the curse, and bring the city of God to earth. I suspect a big part of heaven will be the the incredible sense or our freedom, our release from sin, sickness, and death.

In the meantime, some of us keep trying to scratch an itch only God can cure with temporary fixes and that is OK. OK if we realize where the real answer is. The real answer is in Jesus, in his eternity. But meanwhile, he has "put eternity in the heart of man" (Ecclesiastes 3:11).